Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even should you not have a company and have no interest in Internet marketing (perhaps you do not even know what that's), if you have email, you've experienced the more ugly side of email marketing. You've probably seen the ads for email address lists that offer thousands-or even millions-of email addresses for pocket change.
You will rest assured of one thing: in the event the price is cheap, these are not opt-in lists. Instead, these huge lists are loaded with “collected” email addresses. They have been equal to your summary of street addresses taken from your telephone book.
There is no phone book so where do these cheapo lists come from? Largely, the addresses are picked from forums, membership or pupil lists, newsgroups, message boards, web logs, along with other areas where people gather to swap information. They don't understand their addresses sold on the open market and are being gathered up. They didn't ask to be added to a mass e-mail list. And they surely did not ask to have their inboxes polluted with spam.
Picking email addresses is legal. But it's broadly considered unethical. You won't go to jail or pay a fine. Nevertheless, you can damage your business, maybe irreparably. The potential outcomes for breaking the unwritten rule about no email harvesting range to having your business, from losing your ISP blacklisted to losing your domain.